I have started to think it isn't practical to explain how Bitcoin works to non-technical people. For a long time, I tried to explain it to my parents Then, I realized that people don't understand the payment systems they already use (credit cards, debit cards, bank transfers, even cash). They just know that it has value, when numbers go up or down, who to call when something goes wrong, and how to give someone enough information to handle the transfer process for them. The same thing happened with certificate-based authentication / encryption.